Scheduling Your Mates for Automated Workflows

Description : Learn how to configure custom schedules (cron) for your Mates to automate recurring prompts, reports, and team check-ins on allmates.ai.

🔍 Overview

Imagine having your virtual teammates proactively deliver daily standup summaries, weekly market reports, or periodic system health checks without you ever needing to type a prompt. With Mate Scheduling, you can put your Mates on autopilot.

This feature allows you to attach custom, periodic schedules (using standard cron expressions) directly to any Mate. When a scheduled interval triggers, the Mate automatically executes a pre-configured Markdown prompt and routes the output to your chosen destination.

⚙️ How It Works

Each schedule runs on a dedicated background service that evaluates active schedules every 10 minutes. When a schedule triggers, it initiates a standard conversation pipeline—meaning your scheduled Mate has full access to the same Tools and persistent Knowledge bases as in manual chats.

Available Destinations

📍 Where to Manage Your Schedules

To ensure both powerful administration and user-level control, allmates.ai provides two distinct areas to view and manage your scheduled Mates:

1. From the Mate Profile Card (For Mate Admins)

This is the central control hub for configuring and monitoring a Mate's automation.

• Who can access: Mate admins only.

• What you can do: Create, edit, or delete any schedule attached to this Mate, and view the complete execution history.

• How to find it: Go to Mates & Tools in your sidebar, select your target Mate, and click on the Planification (Scheduling) tab.

2. From Your User Profile (For All Users)

This acts as a personal dashboard and a safety net for automations you have personally set up.

• Who can access: Any user.

• What you can do: View, deactivate, or delete only the schedules created by you. This ensures you can always stop or remove an automation you set up, even if your administrative permissions for that Mate change later.

• How to find it: Click on your avatar in the bottom-left corner, open your User Profile, and navigate to the Scheduled Mates section.

🛠️ Step-by-Step: Creating a Mate Schedule

Note: You must be a Mate admin to configure new schedules. This feature is available starting on the Advanced plan.

1. Navigate to Mates & Tools in your sidebar and select the Mate you want to schedule.

2. Click on the Planification (Scheduling) tab on the Mate's profile card.

3. Click the + Create Schedule button.

4. Fill in the schedule details:

• Name: Give your schedule a clear, descriptive name (e.g., "Weekly Market Summary").

• Prompt: Write the custom Markdown prompt you want the Mate to execute at each run.

• Frequency: Set the execution interval (cron format).

• Timezone: Select your local timezone to ensure accurate execution times.

• Active Toggle: Turn this on to enable the schedule.

1. Select your Destination (Private Conversation or a specific Workspace/Folder).

2. Click Save.

📊 Monitoring & Execution History

To ensure complete transparency and reliability, every schedule includes an Execution History log directly inside the Mate's Planification tab:

• Immutable Snapshots: Each historical entry displays a snapshot of the destination conversation at the exact moment of execution. Even if you modify the schedule later, past execution records remain unchanged.

• Idempotency Safeguards: Built-in transactional controls prevent duplicate runs, ensuring that overlapping ticks never trigger duplicate messages.

Smart Automation Notifications

Scheduled runs trigger native notifications under the Automations category:

• You will receive agent-run-completed or agent-run-failed notifications.

• These notifications display a snapshot avatar of the Mate at the time of the run, making it easy to monitor your automated workflows at a glance.

💡 Tips & Best Practices

• 🎯 Optimize Your Prompts: Since scheduled runs are automated, write highly structured prompts with clear output expectations (e.g., "Provide a bulleted list of the top 3 trends…").

• ⚡ Leverage Mate Knowledge: Attach persistent files to your Mate's Knowledge Tab. Your scheduled Mate will automatically reference this persistent memory during its runs.

• 💡 Keep It Clean: If your scheduled Mate uses external APIs, use the x-hide-property-from-llm tag in your tool schemas to prevent large, technical payloads from cluttering the conversation context.